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The fudge has arrived and made the world just a little bit better. I'm going to spoil my appetite for tea with it.
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Sep 4, 2020 17:52
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I like it when people hold their phones flat like they're carrying an invisible beverage, but then because it's a loud environment press the microphone end against their ear. Also: Guavanaut posted:I think so, but it's telling that she can think of two stereotypical poor Black areas and would base the merits of BLM on that but would not base the merits of whiteness on Tile Hill..
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Sep 10, 2020 18:57
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justcola posted:If I went into a house with no furniture it would cross my mind if I was being murdered or something. Good username/post combo
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Sep 10, 2020 22:01
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Niric posted:This is a very strange statement to make. Not because it's not the kind of thing that the tories would do, but because the "moonshot" is an entirely fictional concept whose large numbers are plucked from the aether with no basis in reality. Why bother to make any statement about the cost (or not) of something that does not, currently cannot, and most likely will not exist? It's the opposite of plausible deniability. If you make up enough details then people start to doubt that it's fiction, especially as the news will give these perspectives equal credence because that's how journalistic balance works innit. I heard it'll be £49.99 for the one day version delivered into your thigh by industrial staplegun, or £10,000 for a lifetime vaccine administered in an aerosol of Chanel #5. There's going to be a vaccination centre in every loaf of Kingsmill. Edit: 108 is 3x3x3x2x2x1. Makes you think. Endjinneer fucked around with this message at 00:00 on Sep 22, 2020 |
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Sep 21, 2020 23:57
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It'd be good to have a snappy counterargument ready for when people come out with "rrrrmember 2019 vote left wing and get boris". Otherwise it's going to become folklore, like Broon ate all the poonds/cap in hand to the IMF/petrol rationing and other pernicious arguments why good things can never happen. Any ideas?
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Sep 22, 2020 22:10
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OwlFancier posted:Vote left wing get the iraq war. Well thanks, but neither of those are really compelling strategies that win people over to left leaning political thinking. What I'm taking aim at, badly, is a modern analogue of that "cap in hand to the IMF" line. It's got a weird cultural resonance of shame and guilt and failure and it comes out every drat time you have "Labour" and "economics" on the same page. It popped up in a beeb article someone recently shared here. Shoehorned in, despite being a complete non sequitur. If you had the time you could go into detail about how it's bollocks, the figures were inflated, nobody was holding a cap and everyone involved is now dead anyway, but that's useless because most people who use the line wouldn't even be able to tell you who held the cap in the first place. They aren't arguing with deliberate insincerity, it's just in our cultural bootloader now that [Labour economics] = [cap in hand to the IMF] The same will happen with Corbynism except the code will be [left wing grassroots uprising] = [brexit, coronavirus, boris, trump] and that'll be the angle of attack against every future left wing insurgency. If we want to another left wing uprising to flourish we need to permanently associate this last one with good things it did achieve. loving page snipe again... BR-116 is a 4,000km long network of highways in Brazil. Endjinneer fucked around with this message at 23:35 on Sep 22, 2020 |
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Sep 22, 2020 23:33
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OwlFancier posted:What I am saying is that I don't think people who trot that out are interested or receptive to being convinced otherwise, they are saying it because it is somthing to say so they don't have to think, and can simply engage their pre-existing bias against anything left wing for whatever reason. OK, but everyone resorts to "rule of thumb" judgements and cognitive biases like that one because they don't have the time or energy to fully interpret all the facts all the time. Arguably our society is driving people to resort to their biases more and more by overloading them with information and allowing them less time for reflection. Everyone's an "idiot" sometimes, so "hurting all the idiots" leads to a pretty lonely utopia. If you understand and control biases in this environment it makes people pliable. From that angle, the "idiots" are victims of manipulation which our opponents certainly are not afraid to indulge in. Given that we don't own any newspapers or TV channels, we can't afford to surrender any other angles. That includes talking to "idiots" and beastly slogans. What you say person to person can sometimes cut through.
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Sep 23, 2020 00:53
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justcola posted:As usual, Fred Dibnah has an interesting bit of telly about architecture; Gutted to have missed structureschat ITT, but here's my bit. There's an availability bias going on where we think ancient structures are well built, when in fact most weren't. It's just that there isn't any evidence of the bad ones because we don't like to leave collapsed structures about for long. Lincoln cathedral, for example, has been flattened by wind, fire, earthquake and incompetence. https://lincolncathedral.com/history-conservation/timeline/ The reason pillars and beams are so overspecified is because they didn't understand structural mechanics, so they threw a lot of material at it and hoped it would work. Often they'd mix techniques up completely. Ancient Greek architecture gets its distinctive style because it uses stone as if it is wood. The two materials have wildly different properties. The rule of thumb back in cathedral and parthenon building times was that if it stood up for five minutes, it would stand up for five hundred years. Put in modern terms- as long as the structure can resist the direction of the applied forces, their magnitude is irrelevant. Unless you live in Lincoln.
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Sep 23, 2020 21:43
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Jaeluni Asjil posted:Friend of mine's father was a fire inspector who used to go and inspect factories. He went to a washing powder manufacturer's factory and he said pretty much the same: about 99% of the powder is the same, and they add a teaspoon of different mixes to the different brands to make them a bit different. I suppose it depends what's in that teaspoon of stuff! My chemistry teacher said this in 1999 so it must be true: Washing powder is an illusion of a market. There are only two manufacturers- Unilever and Procter&Gamble. All the dozen or so brands are owned by these two and the powder is basically identical. As a consumer you might be captivated by one brand or another, but you're basically choosing between boxes of identical powder. All that's different is the scent and maybe some blue sprinkles.
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Sep 28, 2020 22:27
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OwlFancier posted:When I was looking up information surrounding it apparently Sweden has recently opened a new type of steel plant that uses hydrogen rather than coal: We've had hydrogenchat on this thread before and there is such obvious low hanging fruit here. You could take surplus energy from the Yorkshire Shall we do that? No. Let's spend the next five years digging a coal mine 150 miles away from the steelworks along crap, overloaded railway lines. I doubt we'll even have any domestic steel production left by the time they get the coal out.
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Oct 3, 2020 14:35
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Nothingtoseehere posted:Imagine having surplus energy. And hydrogen is a bitch to transport or store away from the site of use, because it's so light and mobile it floats through things. 150 miles is a heck of alot shorter than sourcing the stuff from Poland, Brazil or china aswell. Surplus energy does happen because base load generation is a bitch to turn off. The grid operator charges generation sites rather than paying them. https://www.energylivenews.com/2020/05/26/uks-power-system-emissions-hit-all-time-low-and-wholesale-power-prices-go-negative/ "across the whole 24-hour period, the average day-ahead wholesale price was negative £9.92/MWh" The opposite, load management periods, are equally weird. You get all sorts of places with on-site generation capacity like large industrial plants or water treatment works becoming short term power generators rather than consumers to take advantage of the high energy prices.
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Oct 3, 2020 16:50
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Guavanaut posted:One for OwlFancier. Flitter mouse is close to the German word for bat- Fledermaus. Camrath posted:Special Solidarity Fudge!
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Oct 4, 2020 14:39
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Guavanaut posted:They didn't even used to allow them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6UhXivPyw4
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Oct 9, 2020 08:40
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goddamnedtwisto posted:The consensus seems to be the lower death rate compared to the first wave is a combination of increased testing catching a lot more moderate and asymptomatic cases and there being far more moderate and asymptomatic cases due to more young people catching it, better treatment I think the better treatment is a big factor here. Fatality rate is in effect a function of infection rate. We're not yet rationing hospital capacity so positive cases can get treatment. Once hospitals fill up with COVID or flu patients and we're back in the "call 999 only after you stop breathing" territory like in April the disease will become more frequently fatal.
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Oct 11, 2020 18:03
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Railchat: A lot of railways have the requirement to be fenced written into the original acts of parliament which enabled their construction. Depending on who you ask, that's either for protection of livestock, or because the owners of the estates they cross didn't want the railway oiks getting on to their land. Livestock and trains are a troublesome mix. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polmont_rail_accident
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Oct 14, 2020 18:27
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Unkempt posted:Insurance is probably a thing - a plumber can wreck your entire house, it'd take a lot of work for a carpenter to do that. Lemme tell you a story about a wood butcher round here. He gets called out to fix something on someone's narrowboat. Put some shelves up or whatever. The weeny electric hookup at the moorings trips out when he tries to use his power tools, so he rings up the owner who tells him there's a generator and a can of fuel- but check because it could be petrol or diesel in the can. He can't decide from the smell whether it's petrol or diesel and decides to carry out a small, careful ignition test. He carries the can on deck and dribbles a tiny bit of fuel out. If you're wondering what sort of a person would test flammability by conducting a controlled burn on a customer's home, well.... The fuel is petrol. The controlled burn goes up with a WHOOSH. So does the fuel can which our hero has carelessly left right next to the test site, unstoppered. Faced with the terrifying prospect of a not-at-all-controlled burn, he kicks the can over the side of the boat into the canal. Day saved, right? Wrong. Petrol floats.
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Oct 15, 2020 20:28
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A friend of mine has put together a time-data series of reported COVID19 cases in each local authority displayed on a map. It takes a few seconds to load the data at the start but watching the past 3 months play through at 3 seconds per day is sobering. In mid-summer, you get the feeling we almost had a lid on it. Then the schools go back and it just re-ignites everywhere. http://covid19.refreshgeo.com/
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Oct 21, 2020 00:20
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fatelvis posted:Well, I guess I'm more thinking along the lines of - was it implemented the way it was due to a belief it would make a difference to the financial crisis, or because it was an opportunity to do a bunch of stuff some folks wanted to do anyway? There was a research paper which demonstrated a correlation between high levels of government debt and low economic growth. In one of those catastrophic coincidences that too often seem to determine the course history, it was published at about the same time as certain fertile minds were gaining control of states around the world. Those people had previously been adherents the borrowing=bad ideology, but the paper gave them the "scientific justification" to make that ideology into policy. The paper was not peer reviewed, and was later shown to contain errors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_in_a_Time_of_Debt
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Oct 21, 2020 00:42
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NotJustANumber99 posted:I'm kind of iffy on this. Like you trust the honesty and or capability of these people? A few years ago I had some interest in the pound euro rate and was advised all sorts of things, followed it quite closely and as you say they claimed it was all baked in and wouldn't make a difference and this was definitely what would happen. Without fail after every significant thing that happened they reassessed and said unforeseen circumstances had wobbled the hippo more than expected or whatever and yeah, thing had had the effect. baked in is bollocks. Take a long term view, even then its a mugs game. Buy woodland. Think of it more that in a market like currencies where there are lots of players and trillions of pounds worth of transactions each day, more or less everything that can be known gets built into the price rapidly. So when people talk about "baked in", they mean the human knowledge. The chaotic nature of the real world also weighs heavily on things though, and its effects cannot be known except as they happen. Point is- you can't consistently beat the market unless you have access to information the market doesn't and even then it's helpful if you can predict the future too.
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Oct 22, 2020 00:12
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jabby posted:The public doesn't inherently harbour contradictory opinions, they have contradictory opinions because much of what they're told by those in power is contradictory because it's lies.
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Oct 23, 2020 17:48
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That loving IMF "crap in hand" argument again. The IMF bailout was sought after double-digit inflation and devaluation of the pound made it hard for the Callaghan government to borrow money. Inflation and devaluation triggered by Conservative Chancellor Anthony Barber after his 1972 budget which was designed to stimulate a boom and guarantee another Conservative victory. Given that our inflation rate is currently a massive 0.7% and investors are so desperate to loan money to the government they're willing to pay negative interest rates, I think there's a bit of headroom for a few hungry kids.
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Oct 24, 2020 14:12
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Guavanaut posted:Where do the old school Keynesian Tories who don't give a toss about the morality of feeding hungry kids but know that it has a good fiscal multiplier both immediately in resource spending and long term over the life of the child fit in? Neoliberalism ground their bones for soil improver. Has anyone drawn a parallel with the Irish Potato Famine yet? https://www.irishcentral.com/roots/the-spoilers-93278889-237694361 quote:a Temporary Relief Act, popularly known as “the soup kitchen act” was introduced. As its name suggested, it was to be an interim measure, until the Poor Law could be modified to enable it to provide for both ordinary and Famine relief. The soup kitchens marked a break from earlier relief provisions, which had viewed the giving of gratuitous relief to be both ideologically flawed and financially perilous. The soup kitchens, however, despite the paucity and lack of nutrition of some of the food provided, marked a high point in Famine relief. By July 1847, over three million people (approximately forty percent of the population) were receiving free, daily rations from their local soup kitchen, at relatively little cost to the government. This short-term measure demonstrated that it was both logistically and financially possible to feed the Irish poor. Politically, however, such a solution was unacceptable. There was a general election in the United Kingdom in the summer of 1847, which was won by the Whigs. One of the first acts of the new government was to oversee the introduction of an amended Poor Law, which made the much-detested workhouse system the main provider of relief, and meant that the Famine poor were now to be classified as “paupers.” More significantly, responsibility for financing relief was to pass to local Irish rate-payers through the mechanism of local Poor Law taxation.
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Oct 24, 2020 17:15
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I think part of it is that for the last few decades we've culturally gone all-in with the idea of Benefits Britain Feckless Scroungers. When Ben Bradley tries to reach for a concept of a poor person all he can think of is brothels and crack dens. The idea of "the deserving poor" has been erased from political discourse. Imagine trying to get a Christmas Carol published nowadays. A poor person worthy of sympathy? Too fanciful. That the poor are indolent scroungers is a rock that conservatives (and let's face it, sometimes labour and the lib dems too) have built manifestos and governments on for decades. The reason the tories are so off balance in their response to this is because suddenly the ground is moving beneath their feet.
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Oct 24, 2020 17:52
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Guavanaut posted:How do we get back (or forward) to an attitude of thinking about broad social flows rather than individual moral failings of the poor? That so what if one person just spends all the money on beer, does that not still benefit the shopkeeper (and maybe you stop it through public health rather than cutting them off) and overall the program has a fiscal multiplier of 1.7? The destruction of things that encouraged social mixing such as widespread social housing and free education, plus a systematic attempt to scapegoat the poor for things that weren't their doing. Owen Jones has a pretty good book on it. Undoing it has been impossible because it has become a self-evident truth in our politics. Anyone who questioned it got treated like a flat-earther. What is undoing it is the way the pandemic has brought the suffering so close to home that solidarity is inevitable. It's becoming impossible to 'other' the poor. Once we recognise them as human, who next? The homeless? The jobless? Immigrants? There'll be serious Chernobyl-control-room vibes in Conservative party headquarters right now. big scary monsters posted:Don't give them ideas. And I heard plenty of that stuff when I was more active in alpinism and climbing - people love to bring it up whenever there is a high profile accident in the mountains. "We should have permits to go into the hills, we should require mandatory insurance for hiking, if you have an accident you should pay for the helicopter ride, it's selfish to force other people to put themselves in danger because of your risk taking" and on and on. Insurance is fair enough for extraordinarily high risk/consequence stuff which is also basically essential, such as driving a motor vehicle, but arguments that the individual should solely be responsible end up in absurd attempts to account for every last peccadillo.
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Oct 24, 2020 19:30
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https://twitter.com/amandamilling/status/1319753071602372613 A handy list of politicians who think that a throwaway comment in the house of commons matters more than child poverty. Keith will have his hands full trying to capitulate his way to victory over this, so maybe we could write back to these MPs with some advice on the relative values of words vs deeds? They do like letters after all. Anyone got the chops to pull the names of that letter and match it with the directory of MPs? Condolences WhatEvil. Sorry for your loss. Endjinneer fucked around with this message at 21:07 on Oct 25, 2020 |
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Oct 25, 2020 21:00
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Angepain posted:
Today: You can celebrate the rights you have, but don't you dare protest about the ones you're denied. 5 years time: Now we go to a special broadcast from inside St Paul's cathedral, where along with other married couples you too can be part of England's pride celebrations. Almost didn't check in here tonight because I knew it'd be on a downer, and I'm hurting too. I ragecancelled my membership earlier. 5 years of optimism, 2 campaigns, doorstepping on rainy nights. For gently caress's sake.
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Oct 30, 2020 01:14
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Somewhere inside Downing Street, Robert Peston is kneeling next to the gap beneath a bathroom door. Nose wrinkled against the smell of of whisky and vomit, he pleads over the gargled snoring noises "Please wake up Boris, we need you give us the news. They can't blame you. Somebody leaked it all over Twitter earlier anyway".
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Oct 31, 2020 19:08
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Gonzo McFee posted:https://twitter.com/bbcnickrobinson/status/1322597130566029312?s=19 Fine, shitcan the country but for god's sake get it done before Strictly. There'd be riots.
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Oct 31, 2020 19:20
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To bring everyone together during these dark times I'd like you all to join me to clap for the conservatives. Sarcastically. Thursday, 8pm sharp.
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Nov 1, 2020 13:55
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If we were in positions of responsibility, we'd be paid to act responsibly, so we would. But we aren't, so we won't. Journalism isn't a position of responsibility, we just argue these positions for sport. Anyone who actually does what we say is missing the point.
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Nov 1, 2020 18:05
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Anyone else getting the vibe that the tories are expecting a serious backbench rebellion on lockdown? The Beeb is laying it on really thick. Leading imbecile Steve Baker got the personal treatment at Downing Street yesterday. There's been regular updates on financial support measures over the past day or so, like there's some furious back-room bargaining going on. The bill is going to pass because it'll get labour support, but a serious rebellion makes the tories look like a party that wants mass graves. They've barely got over being the party that wants to starve children.
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Nov 2, 2020 23:38
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Christmas meal tip- wrap dried prunes in bacon and cook alongside your pigs in blankets. Some people call them devils on horseback. Watching the reports of the Florida exit polls I'm struck by sheer level of antipathy towards anything even remotely socialist amongst people hailing from South or Central America, to the extent that they'll vote for someone proudly anti-immigrant. There's plenty to argue with like the fact that Biden isn't remotely socialist, or that life in Guatemala, Cuba or Venezuela was tough partly because of the containment policies implemented by erstwhile trading partners. But if the same word means "affordable healthcare" if you're in Vermont and "voldemort" if you're in Florida, it becomes tricky to handle as a political identity.
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Nov 4, 2020 19:31
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My partner is roasting potatoes for tea right now. It's our only dietary common ground really. Partner doesn't eat meat. I don't eat vegetables- the Lancashire method of preparation being favoured by my parents. I thought carrots were white until I left home.
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Nov 4, 2020 19:57
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justcola posted:Thought I'd have a look at my home towns facebook group to see how they were getting on, turns out its full of poo poo. I thought I'd repost some 'memes' here to creak open the door into the mind of a super gammon. I've seen two incarnations of this one now and it really, really gets on my goat. Someone's clearly set out to show how simple the rules are by making a list meme. They've thought of a couple, made a few more up and then dribbled off into a vague handwaving etcetera etcetera sort of ending. If only the list did go on, to the end, it might have be useful. Instead they've disproven the point they set out to make and outed themselves as the sort of lace-twitching creep that judges people according to a ruleset largely of their own invention. If you made a list of the rules just on weddings that applied until yesterday, you'd run out of space in this format.
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Nov 5, 2020 19:31
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Vitamin P posted:All those good photos and Guardian goes with 'doughiest student alive' It's heras fencing it just lifts out of the drat footings. These kids are paying £9k for an education and it doesn't include that basic fact? I can understand their anger. And the BR class 370 was the original tilting train. When railway tracks go around a corner, one rail is elevated higher than the other to tilt the train, balancing the centripetal forces acting on the train body. It might seem sensible that you'd set this elevation for the maximum linespeed but actually you select a compromise between the maximum value required by faster, light passenger trains and the minimum value required by heavier, slower freight trains using the same line. The technical term for elevating one track against the other is called cant, so the degree the cant is reduced in this compromise is called cant deficiency. Typically on the UK rail network, the cant deficiency is about 60%. The class 370 allowed the train body to tilt further, counteracting the deficiency of cant and giving a more pleasant experience for passengers as well as better high speed cornering. Unfortunately, so the story goes, the early publicity involved luring journalists aboard with abundant free alcohol. The journos drank so much they puked up, but blamed it on the train. It was subsequently abandoned, the technology sold to an Italian company, further developed, introduced successfully and sold back to the UK as the class 390 Pendolino. Endjinneer fucked around with this message at 00:55 on Nov 6, 2020 |
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Nov 6, 2020 00:37
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goddamnedtwisto posted:Deeper doesn't really matter for tunneling, as long as the geology is good - digging a thousand feet deep in clay* is easier and cheaper than 20 feet in waterlogged sand. Ditto the explosives - a hundred feet of granite will mean you can let them all off in one go and not even notice (especially as they're not actually in one big pile, they're scattered over dozens of square miles). Beaufort's Dyke is a much bigger problem for causeways/bridges because then you're having to actually dig/pile through the explosives, which would be an interesting problem in the "may you live in interesting times" sense of the word.  Faulty. You'd tend not to use a TBM for anything except weak sedimentary rocks- it's too hard on the machine. Drill and blast is favoured, along with the New Austrian Tunnelling Method, which is not new, arguably not Austrian and not really a method, more sort of guidelines.
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Nov 6, 2020 18:55
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OwlFancier posted:As ever you can express them by yelling them in the street same as everyone else, doesn't mean you're entitled to anything else. I think you'll find free speech actually means I have the incontrovertible right to prominence on every platform of communication.
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Nov 7, 2020 14:05
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So Donald Trump is now a lame duck president. Cartoonists, do your thing.
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Nov 7, 2020 18:49
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Private Speech posted:An absolutely wonderful idea from the governments friends at deutsche bank: This was my favourite bit: gobshites posted:It argues this is only fair, as those who work from home are saving money and not paying into the system like those who go out to work. What is the system they mean here? Subway and NCP? That this is literally the best justification for additional taxation that they could imagine is pitiful. What about those packed lunch fuckers who cycle to work? They're the real ones cheating the system. They've been at it for years. They could have said: let's tax home workers to fund better services in the community that both they and everyone else will benefit from. Or to fund home insulation improvement schemes that will create employment, help us reduce energy consumption and make people's homes nicer to live and work in. But none of those things are important. What's important is that you're not buying enough bus tickets.
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Nov 11, 2020 23:19
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Oh dear me posted:Satnavs changed my life. Tomtom saved my relationship. DomDom tried to ruin Boris'.
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Nov 14, 2020 15:25
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